History of Trackways at Horton Bluff

Many trackways have been found at Horton Bluff over the years. In 1841, Sir William Logan was intrigued by building stone on the wharf at Windsor, Nova Scotia. His inquiry about its origins lead him to Horton Bluff, where he discovered a set of footprints made by an amphibian 350 million years ago. It was a radical discovery, for until then it was believed that fish were the only vertebrates present at that time and that they did not crawl onto land until the Permian Period, 50 million years later. Logan's was the first evidence of life's earliest tentative steps onto land.

When he displayed the tracks to a meeting of the prestigious Geological Society of London, however, his colleagues failed to acknowledge the importance of the find, holding to the old belief that fish were the only vertebrates in the Lower Carboniferous Period. It was left to Sir William Dawson to vindicate Logan's discovery in his classic book, Air Breathers of the Coal Period.

Dawson himself subsequently found footprints of both amphibians and reptiles at Joggins, Horton Bluff and Windsor. He speculated that these "air breathers of the coal period... haunted tidal flats and muddy shores, perhaps emerging from the water that they might bask in the sun, or possibly searching for food." The trackmakers were probably small animals such as Dendrerpeton and Hylonomus -- certainly not as large as the animal that left the tracks discovered in 1964, which may have been a primary predator.

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